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Content Marketing and Online Trust: The Case of Promoting Knowledge for Video Game Shoppers
Abstract
This paper aims to discover content marketing techniques to create online trust and to help content strategists develop an effective strategy. It investigates the role of different content types and techniques used to convey the message to promote knowledge among customers and their impact on the customers perceived trust. In this research, a quantitative approach was adopted; questionnaires were given to visitors of an Iranian online store specializing in video games. Eventually, 406 responses were received and analyzed by using structural equation modeling. The results show that different kinds of content and techniques conveying the messages of contents have a positive and meaningful correlation with online trust, though the effectiveness of all the content types and approaches was not verified. The results indicate that using the written reviews by experts, Twitter updates, video clips, news and step by step guides have indeed a significant relationship to online customer's trust. Furthermore, entertaining and inspiring approaches to content messages have a positive relationship with online trust.
As the Internet has found its place within different sectors of society, the use of various social networks is increasing and that is why they are utilized for business purposes. Most commercial companies need to do marketing in social networks in order to introduce their goods and/or services. In marketing, appropriate and accurate advertisement of goods based on needs of users of these social networks is required to sell the goods of different companies and manufacturing units in effective ways. In most cases, however, advertising and marketing methods in social networks are not correct and the resulted advertisements are boring and tiring to users and they might ignore them without noticing. Such advertisements will be considered as spam and will be annoying to network users. This is taken into consideration in the present study where users' interests, attitudes, and behavior on Facebook are specified through data mining techniques, based on which content marketing is conducted. The present study is conducted on the social network of Facebook, where content marketing, a new form of marketing, is utilized and instead of introducing the goods, the contents of different goods are presented. The data utilized in the study are actual and related to Facebook users, and therefore, the results can be generalized to other networks. © 2014, Saman Forouzandeh, Heirsh Soltanpanah, & Amir Sheikhahmadi.
The term “content marketing” has been used for many years and is still evolving. The idea of creating valuable, relevant and compelling brand content to share in online media, especially social media, as part of the marketing mix, is generally considered to be a pull strategy in branding and other related disciplines to attract consumer attention. In response to the rising interest in content marketing and lack of a theoretical foundation, an analysis of definitions and related explanations was done to delineate its elements by studying similarities and differences. The purpose of the study was to understand how content marketing is defined and explained in existing literature. Definitions are important and can serve as impetus for changing practices and for moving forward. In addition, a better academic understanding of this concept can also influence how it is practised. The study is guided by literature on content marketing that also included umbrella terms, which reflect conflict about the nature of the field. In order to capture a snapshot idea of definitions and explanations of content marketing which are varied, this study has set the intention to explore rather than to conclude. The attempt was thus made to document the area currently covered by content marketers to provide a better understanding of the concept. The research method applied for this study consisted of different steps. First, the researcher gathered definitions and explanations of content marketing and its various umbrella terms through a rigorous literature review. Second, elements were identified after a thematic inductive analysis using qualitative computer software. Based on this analysis an overview was obtained of how these definitions and explanations relate to the elements which was also triangulated with practitioners’ viewpoints. Six essential elements that encapsulate the field of content marketing became evident to support the proposal of an academic definition. The proposal of a more academic definition can help facilitate a better universal answer to what content marketing constitutes and how it should or could be applied by practitioners in various social media.
Knowledge management is vital to a company's success in this e-commerce era. Not only has the topic of knowledge management attracted much research attention lately, but the management of customer knowledge is also becoming increasingly important. Despite its significance, few research studies have systematically investigated knowledge management in the e-commerce context. None of the studies we reviewed looked at how knowledge management mechanisms were employed in e-commerce. This research presents a comprehensive analysis of the knowledge management mechanisms employed by 14 e-commerce sites that were rated as being the best by Gomez.com, an independent Internet quality measurement firm. Specifically, we analyzed the knowledge acquisition, knowledge dissemination, and knowledge sharing mechanisms employed by these leading e-commerce sites. As a pioneering research in this area, the findings have important implications for e-commerce companies seeking to enhance their knowledge management practices.
E-commerce success, especially in the business-to-consumer area, is determined in part by whether consumers trust sellers and products they cannot see or touch, and electronic systems with which they have no previous experience. This paper describes a theoretical model for investigating the four main antecedent influences on consumer trust in Internet shopping, a major form of business-to-consumer e-commerce: trustworthiness of the Internet merchant, trustworthiness of the Internet as a shopping medium, infrastructural (contextual) factors (e.g., security, third-party certification), and other factors (e.g., company size, demographic variables). The antecedent variables are moderated by the individual consumer's degree of trust propensity, which reflects personality traits, culture, and experience. Based on the research model, a comprehensive set of hypotheses is formulated and a methodology for testing them is outlined. Some of the hypotheses are tested empirically to demonstrate the applicability of the theoretical model. The findings indicate that merchant integrity is a major positive determinant of consumer trust in Internet shopping, and that its effect is moderated by the individual consumer's trust propensity.
In this paper we report research results investigating microblogging as a form of electronic word-of-mouth for sharing consumer opinions concerning brands. We ana- lyzed more than 150,000 microblog postings containing branding comments, sentiments, and opinions. We inves- tigated the overall structure of these microblog postings, the types of expressions, and the movement in positive or negative sentiment. We compared automated methods of classifying sentiment in these microblogs with man- ual coding. Using a case study approach, we analyzed the range, frequency, timing, and content of tweets in a corporate account. Our research findings show that 19% of microblogs contain mention of a brand. Of the brand- ing microblogs, nearly 20% contained some expression of brand sentiments. Of these, more than 50% were posi- tive and 33% were critical of the company or product. Our comparison of automated and manual coding showed no significant differences between the two approaches. In analyzing microblogs for structure and composition, the linguistic structure of tweets approximate the linguistic patterns of natural language expressions. We find that microblogging is an online tool for customer word of mouth communications and discuss the implications for corporations using microblogging as part of their overall marketing strategy.
If you have a website, a blog, or even a Facebook or Twitter presence, you are a publisher. Think like one: build a digital content strategy that embraces words, images and multimedia to systematically enhance consumer engagement and conversion rates. In Content Marketing, world-renowned digital content expert Rebecca Lieb offers all the detailed, actionable guidance you'll need. Lieb guides you through planning what you'll say online, how and where you'll say it, how often you'll communicate, and how you'll measure your effectiveness. She offers practical guidance for "listening" to conversations about your brand, products, and services, responding more effectively, and effectively informing those conversations. You'll learn how to use your digital content strategy to shape marketing, branding, PR, SEO, customer and media relations, blog content, social media initiatives, and of course, your website. Lieb drills down to offer detailed, actionable advice for issues such as choosing distribution channels making sure you don't run out of things to say making your content "findable" promoting two-way dialogue. Using her techniques, you can market far more effectively and personally build loyalty as you inform and entertain customers and reduce or even eliminate advertising costs. Think about it: why buy media when, today, you are the media?
Social media marketing has become the newest form of advertising for companies. The mobile-social platform, Instagram, has become an important tool for marketing. About two-thirds of big companies are already using Instagram to their advantage. There are no set guidelines on how companies should be advertising themselves on Instagram but there are patterns. The purpose of the study is to find out which Instagram marketing technique out of the three I’ve chosen can be the most successful when trying to achieve more followers, have a wider brand recognition, and increase sales. The marketing techniques I’ve chosen are Instagram posts showing celebrity endorsements, customers wearing a company’s product, and hosting Instagram contests where a consumer will post an Instagram for a chance to win a giveaway. When analyzing and interpreting results from three questionnaires conducted among college students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, it revealed that this sample group is not likely to follow an Instagram account after seeing a celebrity endorsement post. More findings are presented under the measures section and theoretical and practical implications, limitations and future research can be found under discussion.
Purpose
– This paper aims to draw attention to the emerging phenomenon of business to business (B2B) digital content marketing, offers a range of insights and reflections on good practice and contributes to theoretical understanding of the role of digital content in marketing. B2B digital content marketing is an inbound marketing technique and hence offers a solution to the declining effectiveness of traditional interruptive marketing techniques.
Design/methodology/approach
– Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 key informants involved in B2B content marketing in the USA, UK and France, in five industry sectors.
Findings
– B2B digital content marketing is an inbound marketing technique, effected through web page, social media and value-add content, and is perceived to be a useful tool for achieving and sustaining trusted brand status. Creating content that is valuable to B2B audiences requires brands to take a “publishing” approach, which involves developing an understanding of the audience’s information needs, and their purchase consideration cycle. Valuable content is described as being useful, relevant, compelling and timely. Content marketing requires a cultural change from “selling” to “helping”, which in turn requires different marketing objectives, tactics, metrics and skills to those associated with more traditional marketing approaches. The article concludes with a theoretical discussion on the role of digital content in marketing, thereby contextualising the findings from this study within a broader exploration of the role of digital content in marketing and relational exchanges.
Originality/value
– As the first research study to explore the use of digital content marketing in B2B contexts, this research positions digital content marketing with regard to prior theory, and provides both an agenda for further research, and suggestions for practice.
More and more large and small brands are engaging in a marketing activity called content marketing: the idea that storytelling is key to attract and retain customers. Content marketing expert Joe Pulizzi details the history of content marketing, the opportunities, and six differences that separate good to great content marketers for publishers.
A considerable amount of research has examined trust since our 1995 publication. We revisit some of the critical issues that we addressed and provide clarifications and extensions of the topics of levels of analysis, time, control systems, reciprocity, and measurement. We also recognize recent research in new areas of trust, such as affect, emotion, violation and repair, distrust, international and cross-cultural issues, and context-specific models, and we identify promising avenues for future research.
This study examines the antecedents and consequences of consumer trust in the United States, Singapore and China. The results show that reputation and system assurance of an Internet vendor and consumers’ propensity to trust are positively related to consumer trust. Consumers’ trust has a positive relationship with attitude and a negative relationship with perceived risk. Implications of the results are discussed.
A problem in the design of decision aids is how to design them so that decision makers will trust them and therefore use them appropriately. This problem is approached in this paper by taking models of trust between humans as a starting point, and extending these to the human-machine relationship. A definition and model of human-machine trust are proposed, and the dynamics of trust between humans and machines are examined. Based upon this analysis, recommendations are made for calibrating users' trust in decision aids.
The credibility of web sites is becoming an increasingly important area to understand. To expand knowledge in this domain, we conducted an online study that investigated how different elements of Web sites affect people's perception of credibility. Over 1400 people participated in this study, both from the U.S. and Europe, evaluating 51 different Web site elements. The data showed which elements boost and which elements hurt perceptions of Web credibility. Through analysis we found these elements fell into one of seven factors. In order of impact, the five types of elements that increased credibility perceptions were “real-world feel”, “ease of use”, “expertise”, “trustworthiness”, and “tailoring”. The two types of elements that hurt credibility were “commercial implications&rdquo ;and “amateurism”. This large-scale study lays the groundwork for further research into the elements that affect Web credibility. The results also suggest implications for designing credible Web sites.
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